Colonel Gaddafi is a man of eccentricities. There is his bodyguard of "revolutionary nuns", the heavily armed young women who follow him at all times. There are his flamboyant interviews and dotty gestures, such as last month's announcement that all Libya's soldiers and policemen had been simultaneously promoted.

Then there are his stories. Yes, when he is not massacring rebels or inspecting women's uniforms, Gaddafi is a writer. Though best known for his political tract The Green Book, the Libyan leader branched out in the 90s with Escape to Hell and Other Stories, which flits between allegorical fiction and political essay. In The Astronaut's Suicide, for instance, we read about a man who returns to Earth after a long period on the moon, only to find himself tragically unsuited to the demands of a terrestrial economy. There is a hint to the story's ending in its title.

Awful though Gaddafi's book is, he is not alone. As Daniel Kalder, Robert Fisk and others have pointed out, tyrants seem notably fond of writing. Hitler, Stalin, Khomeini, Mao: one wonders if they chose a career in despotism only as a route to a publishing contract. Certainly it is hard to see how their books would have made it into print without the threat of torture.

Take Zabiba and the King, a historical romance whose title page carries the words "by its author Saddam Hussein". ("Call this ghostwritten," it suggests to me, "and there's an unmarked grave with your name on it.") Released in 2000, it tells the story of an 8th-century Arab king's relationship with a beautiful woman. It became a bestseller in Iraq, and was even adapted into a musical, despite one alarming and improbable scene in which a female bear "copulates" with a herdsman.

Or consider Kim Jong-il. The North Korean leader managed to write 1,500 books in his university years alone. Among his mature works, the best known are the forbiddingly titled Our Socialism Centred on the Masses Shall Not Perish and On the Art of the Cinema. Perceptive comments in the latter include: "Language is extremely important in literature."

No matter how powerful they become, it seems there is one thing that no despot can ever have: an honest editor.